An interconnect fabric provides for communication among a set of nodes in a network. Communications originate within the network at a source node and terminate at a terminal node. Thus, a wide variety of networks may be viewed as a set of source nodes that communicate with a set of terminal nodes via an interconnect fabric. For example, a storage area network may be arranged as a set of computers as source nodes which are connected to a set of storage devices as terminal nodes via an interconnect fabric that includes communication links and devices such as hubs, routers, switches, etc. Devices such as hubs, routers, switches, etc., are hereinafter referred to as interconnect devices. Depending on the circumstances, a node may assume the role of source node with respect to some communications and of terminal node for other communications.
The communication requirements of an interconnect fabric may be characterized in terms of a set of flow requirements. A typical set of flow requirements specifies the required communication bandwidth from each source node to each terminal node. The design of an interconnect fabric usually involves selecting the appropriate arrangement of physical communication links and interconnect devices and related components that will meet the flow requirements.
Techniques for designing interconnect fabrics are being developed and refined. In order to evaluate the effectiveness of an interconnect fabric design technique, it may be desirable to apply the technique to a variety of design problems, for example, various sets of flow requirements, for which a feasible solution exists. The generation of such fabric design problems presents a barrier to the evaluation of design techniques. This is because design problems have largely been generated by manually. Accordingly, such techniques can be time-consuming, tedious and error-prone.
Generation techniques have been developed. These include NETGEN, described by Klingman, et al. in “NETGEN: A program for generating large-scale capacitated assignment, transportation, and minimum cost flow network problems,” Management Science, pp. 814-820 (1974) and GRIDGEN, described by Bertsekas in “Linear Network Optimization”, The MIT Press, Cambridge/London, 1991, appendix A.1.1. These techniques, however, are limited in their ability to specify network problem characteristics.
Therefore, what is needed is an improved technique for generating interconnect fabric requirements. It is to these ends that the present invention is directed.